FEATURE: Some Asians’ US college plan: Don’t tick ‘Asian’

AP, NEW YORK

Lanya Olmstead was born in Florida to a mother who immigrated from Taiwan and an American father of Norwegian ancestry. Ethnically, she considers herself half--Taiwanese and half--Norwegian. However, when applying to Harvard, Olmstead checked only one box for her race: white.

For years, many Asian--Americans have been convinced that it’s harder for them to gain admission to the top US colleges.

Studies show that Asian--Americans meet these colleges’ admissions standards far out of proportion to their 6 percent representation in the US population and that they often need test scores hundreds of points higher than applicants from other ethnic groups to have an equal chance of admission.

Critics say these numbers, along with the fact that some top colleges with race-blind admissions have double the Asian percentage of Ivy League schools, prove the existence of discrimination.

The way it works, the critics believe, is that Asian-Americans are evaluated not as individuals, but against the thousands of other ultra-achieving Asians who are stereotyped as boring academic robots.

Now, an unknown number of students are responding to this concern by declining to identify themselves as Asian on their applications.

For those with only one Asian parent, whose names don’t give away their heritage, that decision can be relatively easy. Harder are the questions that it raises: What’s behind the admissions difficulties? What, exactly, is an Asian--American — and is being one a choice?

Olmstead is a freshman at Harvard and a member of the Half-Asian People’s Association (HAPA). In high school, she had a perfect 4.0 grade-point average and scored 2,150 out of a possible 2,400 on the SAT college admission test, which she calls “pretty low.”

College applications ask for parent information, so Olmstead knows that admissions officers could figure out a student’s background that way. She did write in the word “multiracial” on her own application.

Still, she would advise students with one Asian parent to “check whatever race is not Asian.”

“Not to really generalize, but a lot of Asians, they have perfect SATs, perfect GPAs ... so it’s hard to let them all in,” Olmstead says.

Amalia Halikias is a Yale freshman whose mother was born in the US to Chinese immigrants; her father is a Greek immigrant. She also checked only the “white” box on her application.

“As someone who was applying with relatively strong scores, I didn’t want to be grouped into that stereotype,” Halikias says. “I didn’t want to be written off as one of the 1.4 billion Asians that were applying.”

However, leaving the Asian box blank felt wrong to Jodi Balfe, a Harvard freshman who was born in South Korea and came to the US at age three with her South Korean mother and white American father. She checked the box against the advice of her high school guidance counselor, teachers and friends.

“I felt very uncomfortable with the idea of trying to hide half of my ethnic background,” Balfe says. “It’s been a major influence on how I developed as a person. It felt like selling out, like selling too much of my soul.”

However, other students feel no conflict between a strong Asian identity and their response to what they believe is injustice.